


There Are Flowers

by not_poignant



Series: The Fae Tales Verse - canon extras [4]
Category: Fae Tales - not_poignant, Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Original Work
Genre: Agoraphobia, Caretaking, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Ouranophobia, PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Rehabilitation, Romantic Friendship, Speech Disorders, severe agoraphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-12
Updated: 2015-01-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 07:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3166064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_poignant/pseuds/not_poignant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone always wants to know about the heroes and how they won the war, but all Anika the sparrow-girl wants to know is how to best look after a hero who was shattered by the war, and how to bring his broken heart peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Are Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> Want to listen to this story? [There's a Podcast by the awesome eatjamfast!](http://www.mediafire.com/file/2n9s1smx0lhsc9d/There+Are+Flowers.mp3.mp3)
> 
> Canon for the Augus/Gwyn storyline/s in the Fae Tales Verse, but hopefully doesn't need any understanding of those stories to read. 
> 
> This is a story of Anika the sparrow-girl, and Terho the mouse-lad. It's also a story about tiny fairy cows. Because tiny fairy cows!!! 
> 
> And for once, this is a story about _Seelie_ fae.

Anika placed everything into the basket with love.

The word bothered her the first time it flittered into her mind, when she nestled the wrapped cheese alongside the cob of bread, the sheaves of millet grain, the greens that gave him nourishment. That very first time, she’d stopped and fumbled the cheese, looking down at her little clawed fingers. She’d blinked at the woven hamper and spoken the word quietly, tasted it in her mouth, fulsome and frightening.

Now it was a comfortable word, and it didn’t bother her anymore. It was a round word. Round like the moon when it was full. And it sat inside her chest, and she hoped maybe one day, it would heal him.

*

Anika was a sparrow shifter. Specifically, she was a house sparrow shifter, dismally common, and not very special even by fae standards. House sparrows had hardly any folklore attached to them that wasn’t about hearth and home, had very little heritage. They were just…sparrows. She had a little cap of rust red hair that she kept short and curled around her ears in a slightly overgrown pixie cut. At a little over five foot tall, so spindly that her father told her she would blow away on a windy day, she was as tall as she was ever going to get.

Anika and her father and mother lived in a tiny cottage on the fae side of Stavanger, Norway. Their great grandfather had once done fine aerial combat service for the wise Oak King, who had once ruled the Seelie fae. As a rare blessing, they had been granted protected Seelie land. For very plain sparrows of middling status, with little heritage, they were lucky to occupy their own meadow, their own fields, their own lake unburdened by Unseelie fae.

It was a humble life. Aside from the land bequeathed to them, they lived simply. They harvested their own grains, they made their own cheese from little fairy cows that only came up to Anika’s hip and had to be sung to for three nights before they would produce their healing milk. They grew their own fruits and kneaded the dough for their own bread. During rare balmy sunsets, they would shift into their true, sparrow forms and duck and wheel in the lilac and golds of the sky, snatching up insects that pushed their way out of the river and the nearby lake, feasting and chirping, content.

She had wanted a simple life for herself. A simple love. She dreamed of meeting another little sparrow boy.

But that was before the new King had come and delivered a mouse.

*

It was such blessed, protected land, and so largely forgotten by anyone, that Anika’s father wasn’t surprised that the Seelie King – Gwyn ap Nudd – wanted to keep a valued political pawn there. The mouse would get his own home. He would be sectioned off behind trees and additional wards were to be placed around him.

The King glowed like white-gold, but it was a trick of the light, she thought, because sometimes she would blink and he would look normal. But so tall. She craned her neck to look up at him, and he ripped at their tiny house with his glamour. He stood still, but his deep voice and his imposing vigour upended their peace.

But her father and mother had no choice but to agree that they would feed and keep the little mouse boy. In the end, the King had bade them all make blood-oaths with a knife tip that scared Anika as she pressed it across her finger. They had to make strange promises. They had to promise they would not force the mouse boy outside. That they would not go into the cottage without the mouse boy’s permission. They had to promise to bring him food and water every day. They had to leave him in peace if he desired it. They couldn’t tell anyone. Finally, Anika’s father was given a charm to summon the King, should the mouse boy escape or run away.

‘But Papa,’ Anika said, when the King teleported away, calling the _sun_ to him as he left. ‘He doesn’t even wear a crown.’

‘He doesn’t need to, birdling,’ her father said, staring at the space the King had left behind with a grim look on his face.

*

Anika wanted the job of visiting the mouse boy. Her father and mother lived busy lives, filled with the little jobs of keeping their family alive; they were only too happy for her to take on the responsibility. Anika, too, had her chores. But she had time to put some of their plenty aside for him. The little mouse boy.

*

His name was Terho, and he did not talk. In fact, she never saw him. The cottage he lived in was even tinier than her family’s, and there was only one window cut into the stone at the front. A little circle, enough for her to rest the hamper upon it and peer inside into dimness.

*

At first, her natural shyness stopped her from saying much aside from a hello, saying she was leaving the food, and a goodbye.

And in those early months, none of the food was eaten. She would see all her careful, painstaking arrangements a bit staler the day after, completely untouched.

It was a bit like visiting a ghost. She never saw him. He could have escaped and run away and none of them would have known. She brought food to what felt like an empty little cottage.

It was strangely freeing. And so she began to talk to him. Or, perhaps, she talked more to herself. She talked about the land they lived on, and their brave great grandfather, and about flying and what it felt like in the sky.

The first time she heard his voice it was a shaken rasp, so small she had to strain for it, and he’d said one sentence:

‘P-please st-stop t-talking about the _sky_.’

She was too mortified to say anything at all after that.

*

Two weeks after, she laid the hamper on the window gingerly, and knelt down to pull some weeds out of the little garden beds she’d created around his cottage. There were all sorts of flowers. Because she didn’t have to grow edibles, she let her imagination run wild, and there was always some kind of colour blossoming forth no matter the season. There was a vine now gamely crawling up the side of the stone cottage, and soon there would be more.

She smiled at the dirt, scratching her fingers into it, hoping the smell of freshly turned soil would calm him. Help him. She still felt terrible that the first thing he’d asked her to do was _stop_ talking.

There was a faint sound above her, and she looked up in time to see the hamper quickly plucked from the stone window. She caught nothing more than a glimpse of elongated mouse fingers – he was in human or hybrid form then – and the sleeve of what might have been a robe or cowl.

‘I’m s-sorry,’ the voice said. He sounded young. Small. Frail.

‘The food is for you!’ Anika said, resisting the urge to push herself up and look in the window. Her heart beat a tattoo in her chest, thrumming all the way through her. She looked down and piled the weeds together, taking quick, shallow breaths. ‘It’s for you, Terho.’

‘I made you st-stop,’ the voice said. ‘You t-talked b-before.’

‘I’m sorry!’ Anika said, her cheeks turning hot. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you!’

She heard sounds inside. The hamper being opened perhaps. She couldn’t pick most of the sounds at all. It made her realise how seldom she’d heard him move. A few seconds later, the hamper was pushed back onto the windowsill.

‘You d-don’t offend me,’ Terho said.

‘Okay,’ Anika said, looking up at the cane hamper. ‘Are you okay in there? Terho, do you need anything?’

Terho didn’t say anything else, and feeling a mix of disappointment and elation at the progress they’d made, she took the hamper home. When she brought it into the kitchen, she set it on their rustic table and opened it. He’d taken the bread, the millet, the bundle of greens. Her heart skipped over itself.

*

The times Terho spoke were few and far between. She came to expect to hear his voice at least once a week. He said very little and shared no personal details. Sometimes she heard him whisper farewell when she left. Other times, he asked her about her life, and she talked about all the details she could think of. From the apple tree they were nursing every year since a hard frost, to the little calves that ran about her feet, mooing with delight whenever she sung to them.

He always stuttered, and his voice was always small and hesitant.

It was the first time she’d ever felt tall and imposing. The first time in her life that she’d had a sense of the largeness of herself. In the way he treated her, she saw that she could be intimidating, she held a strange kind of power.

She didn’t know how it could be possible, because she knew she was just a little thing. A little sparrow girl. And sometimes, when she thought about what must have happened in his life to make him like that, to award her so much fear and hesitation and raw gratitude when she talked to him…sometimes it made tears run down her face as she fell asleep at night.

*

She knew a little about it. She’d picked up bits and pieces from her mother and father, and sometimes she picked up gossip about the Seelie mouse boy who had ruined the world in one moment and healed it the next, all because his innate power, his fae ability, was to undo any lock in the world.

He’d released the most fearsome villain in the fae world, and then imprisoned him again; but not before that creature had done terrible damage to their realm.

The Nightingale she knew of. Whispers of the Each Uisge still sent terrible shudders through her body even though he was captured – maybe even killed by now. And so hearing that Terho was tied to their capture shocked her. Because he was small. He lived in his little cottage prison like he _wanted_ it.

*

The King visited. He looked tired. When he learned that Anika was the one that brought Terho his food, he asked to speak to her privately, and they wandered out a ways into the meadow. He kneeled on canvas trousers, and still managed to make her feel like a tiny piece of feathery down that could be blown away with a single breath.

‘Does he eat?’ the King asked.

‘Sometimes, Your Majesty.’

‘Does he talk?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Not very much, really. He’s very shy.’

‘He was always shy,’ the King said, looking out into the horizon, something stern and…sad on his face. She thought there should be statues of him, but that she didn’t want to live anywhere near them. He was the War King. And she could feel it, too. He jangled. He felt like violence contained in flesh.

‘Has he ever come outside?’

‘No, Your Majesty,’ Anika said, with a certainty, even though she wasn’t there every day or night to watch him.

The King sighed and bowed his head briefly, and then turned his head and caught her gaze with eyes so pale, they were like the blue shadows in icebergs. Bizarrely, she thought his hair was pretty. He was a strange King. He wasn’t wearing shoes. He didn’t wear a crown.

‘You’re okay with bringing him food every day?’ the King said, and Anika nodded, a little smile gracing her face.

‘It’s no problem, Your Majesty.’

‘Are you certain?’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He’s…not any sort of problem, Your Majesty.’

‘Good,’ he said, standing and walking towards the cottage. ‘Leave us in private, please. I am going to speak to him.’

And she watched him stride off, his steps long and bold, crushing flowers underfoot. She wanted to run after him and tell him that if she was too tall, to intimidating for Terho, then he would _definitely_ be too imposing. She wanted to warn Terho. It was a bizarre instinct. For wasn’t the King the one who had ensured Terho’s protection?

The rest of the fae world didn’t want him alive. Didn’t want any fae who could potentially unlock the Nightingale, so that he could once more prowl their world and ruin their existence.

*

Anika was right. The next time she visited Terho, he didn’t speak, and he didn’t take the hamper.

And so it went for another month.

The King had _upset_ him, and Anika was frightened of her own anger over the matter. He was the Seelie King, and she was a tiny sparrow with the notch from a blood oath on her finger. But she’d worked so painstakingly hard to help Terho, and now she felt like the King had – in a moment – dashed it all and she would have to start again.

*

She came at night, once, when she couldn’t sleep. She brought the hamper, and weeded the small garden beds under the light of the moon. She thought she heard movement coming from inside the cottage, but didn’t look up, kept about her business. She’d announced herself, so he wouldn’t be scared.

‘I used to be a h-healer,’ he said, out of nowhere. She looked up, fingers in the dirt, knees stained with soil. ‘Imagine th-that.’

His voice was dark and cynical, and then he laughed. His voice was dry. She didn’t think he was drinking enough. She brought him water every day. And he could pump himself water from inside so he could clean himself, so he could also drink.

He never lit any candles that she could tell. He never read any of the books or parchments that she brought him. The only extra item of clothing that he took was a thick pair of mittens that she’d knitted herself when the weather started to turn. He would have been cold in the tiny cottage, but he rejected almost everything that seemed to make his life richer. He rejected sweets and tasty foods. He rejected colour and stimulation. As far as she knew, he spent every day huddled in the dark, living like a prisoner, even though he didn’t need to.

‘I’m sorry,’ Anika said, when his laughter trailed off. ‘I’m sorry for everything you went through.’

‘No,’ Terho said, his voice frighteningly calm. ‘It’s all right. I brought it all on m-myself.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Anika said, yanking a weed out harder than she intended and showering herself with dirt.

‘You’re very sweet,’ Terho said, and she flushed with pleasure before he’d finished his sentence. ‘You’re very mis-misguided.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that, given you’ve never even _seen_ me,’ Anika said, keeping her voice light. ‘The King scares you, doesn’t he? He scared you.’

‘He m-means well,’ Terho whispered. ‘B-but he can be c-cruel, too.’

‘But he’s the Seelie King!’

‘If you h-had a…villain, and you c-could make them g-go away by t-telling a m-mouse what to d-do. No m-matter how _scared_ that mouse was…’

‘I’d find another way,’ Anika said. ‘There’s always another way!’

Terho laughed again.

‘Sweet, but m-misguided. I think…I know.’

*

Terho didn’t talk like that often, even when she disrupted her sleep to visit him more at night. She couldn’t predict what would make him talk, and the rest of the time things went on as usual. He picked at food, he didn’t come outside of the cottage, he lived in the dark, and she realised as more time went on that her heart was beginning to ache for him, she was starting to _feel_ for him. It was around the time when she realised that love was a big word, and that she was capable of feeling it. Love made her feel large too, but in a different way. There were times it made her feel heavy like a stone. There were times it made her feel light enough to shift and fly in the air even without her wings.

She questioned it, she scrutinised it. She turned her love for Terho up and down and up again, examining it from every which way. She hardly knew him. She had never _seen_ him. He was damaged and fractured, like the apple tree they nursed; that her whole family knew would die one day. It would simply die. They nursed it anyway, its apples were sweet.

But it probably wouldn’t last another winter.

Terho made her life complicated. He wasn’t a handsome, pixie-ish sparrow boy. He didn’t appear to have a family or any friends, and he was dangerous to know. She was no idiot, she knew that just by having him in proximity to her family’s house put her and her family in danger too. The blood oaths to not speak about Terho had not just been for Terho’s protection.

Because the more she listened out for news about Terho the mouse-lad – thin on the ground as it was during these troubled times – the more she realised that Terho was in real danger. That he needed to be protected not just from horrifying villains, but from everyone.

After a while, she stopped listening out for the gossip. It always covered the same subjects, and it didn’t give her the details of Terho that she craved. Those she had to hear from Terho’s mouth, the very few times he chose to give them to her.

He taught her that language was very powerful, and that some people were so afraid of it, they could hardly speak.

She, on the other hand, prattled away day after day, talking to him about the flowers she’d planted for him, how robust the vine was, how there were ladybirds on the roses. She kept up a steady flow of chatter, talking herself hoarse sometimes, telling stories of sparrow lords and sparrow ladies and sparrow heroes that didn’t exist. In lieu of a rich mine of heritage to pull from, she made up tales of derring-do, and was very careful not to mention the sky.

*

The King returned two months later, and he sought out Anika, who was picking grains with her quick, clever fingers. She turned to face him immediately, dropping the grains in a basket and bowing deep. When she stood up again, her eyes flicked over her face, and she was shocked at how stressed he looked. Did Kings look stressed? For a second she was horrified, thinking that the Nightingale had escaped, that the King would need Terho.

‘Your Majesty,’ she said.

‘Anika,’ he said in acknowledgement. He looked around, then pursed his lips. ‘Have there been any changes?’

‘No,’ she said. It was true enough. Perhaps Terho talked a fraction more, but if she made it seem like he was doing better, maybe he would go and smash through that progress once more. She was angry just to see him there.

‘Okay,’ he said, and then turned and walked towards the grove of distant trees that held Terho’s tiny cottage.

‘No!’ she shouted.

She’d shouted at the _King._

Her face felt taut with stress as she dropped to her knees and bowed her head. She heard him stop and walk back to her, and she was shaking her head and couldn’t stop.

‘What has happened?’ the King said, his voice hard.

‘Nothing has happened!’ she said to the dirt beneath her. ‘Nothing! But the last time you came, he didn’t talk to me for _ages._ You scare him! You ruin all his progress! Do you _need_ to see him? Your Majesty, I’m sorry. You bade me care for him. I am caring for him. You scare him so much.’

‘Then I will need to talk to you,’ the King said, his voice cold. ‘And I will not talk to you while you face the ground. Stand up. We shall go for a walk.’

Anika pushed herself upright. The King didn’t offer her a chivalrous arm or hand, but she would have wanted to reject it anyway. Everything about him annoyed her, in that moment. But she stood and picked up her basket of grains, and they walked it to her family’s house. He thought he would talk to her, but he said nothing on that short walk.

They took a longer walk, and the King of the Seelie strode across the meadow as though he knew it better than Anika did. He walked to the river, and immediately sought out the small sandy bank which was hidden behind shrubs. It was a sandy bank that – until then – only she and her family visited. Now, the King walked across it with bare feet, and then sank down so that he could sit with his knees bent, his wrists resting on his knees. She could almost see the boy in him then.

‘Something is coming,’ the King said, looking across the river. ‘I may not be able to see Terho for a long, long time. I suspect you’d be relieved, given how much I frighten the boy.’

‘Is it the Nightingale?’

‘No,’ the King said, shaking his head. ‘Something else. Anika, tell me, do you care for him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do.’

It hit her that she’d stopped saying ‘Your Majesty’ and he hadn’t once reprimanded her, or even looked at her askance. They were having a _conversation_ and she wasn’t even addressing him as King. She knelt carefully, about two metres away from him. Even so, his energy frayed at her own. She could imagine him with a sword and armour. She could imagine him slaying any enemy that got in his way.

‘Would you keep caring for him if I was no longer…if I had to go away?’

Anika stared at him, and the King finally looked at her, the grimness on his face giving way to something very like fear.

‘Anika, would you keep him nourished and protected, even if everything changed? If you began to hear terrible things about me?’

‘Yes,’ Anika said, the word long and hesitant. ‘Yes, of course I would. I made an oath. Seelie know all about oaths, don’t they?’

‘Yes,’ the King said, blinking once, as though pained, and then looking out across the river. ‘You’re a good Seelie fae, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Anika said. ‘I’m just a sparrow. We’re not the heroes in anything. But I like Terho, Your Majesty. No matter what happens, if he is in that cottage, and I am living nearby, I will get him food and more as he needs it.’

The King took a breath, held it, and then sighed it out.

‘Your great grandfather was a hero,’ the King said, dropping his fingers to the sand on the riverbank, and tracing circles into it. ‘And you? Do you feel fettered by your oath? Anika, you must be honest with me.’

‘I don’t,’ Anika said. ‘I like him, Your Majesty. It might sound silly, but…there it is. I don’t think he knows that I like him though.’

‘I don’t think he knows that anyone does,’ the King said, looking at his fingers. ‘He’s been very hurt, Anika. By…everything. By life. By villains. By me.’

‘He said you were…cruel.’

‘I am cruel,’ the King said, lifting his gaze and staring at her through lashes that were thick, and so pale they were almost white.

‘Will he ever know that I like him?’ Anika said, voice stupidly earnest, so much higher than that deep thrum of the King’s voice.

‘Honestly?’ the King said, smiling grimly, ‘I doubt it.’

 _I love him,_ she thought, _and he might not ever know it._

She wiped at her wet eyes quickly, and offered a tremulous smile when the King looked at her in something that could have been sympathy, if she’d thought he was capable of it.

‘I want you to tell him that I care for him, when you think he might…be able to hear those words,’ the King said. ‘But I need you to tell him – soon – that there will come a day when he might think very differently of me, a day when everything changes. Tell him that I have made plans to ensure his protection no matter what happens to me. Tell him that you’ll be there for him.’

‘No matter what happens to you?’ Anika said, her voice soft. ‘But you are the King. Nothing can happen to you.’

The laugh that the King gave her was as cynical as Terho’s, and just as wounded.

In that moment, he was not large at all, but as small as a mouse-lad in a tiny cottage.

*

A week later, Anika had resolved not to tell Terho about the visit until he seemed strong enough for a conversation.

Terho took the cheese from the hamper for the first time.

And he took it every day after that, no matter the type of cheese, or whether it was a narrow wedge or a large hank. It was such a huge development for her, that she immediately told her father and mother, who looked faintly perplexed, even as they smiled on behalf of her happiness.

*

How quickly progress could be shattered.

One night, Anika looked at the garden beds around Terho’s cottage and realised that she tended them so painstakingly for the day Terho would look out of his window. For the day he would come outside. He would see not just grass, but a little cobblestone pathway and a sprawling garden with lots of flowers, freshly turned soil. He would be encouraged to look down, not up at the sky.

Everything was flowering. There were even yellow glowdaisies that kept up a little warm light around her fingers and claws, and limned everything else and made the plants golden. They were fragrant, smelling of vanilla, making her think of ginger cookies or vanilla and nutmeg tea. She pressed her nose to them, sniffing deeply, sneezing at the rush of pollen in her nose.

Nearby, a bird sang musically, beautifully.

Terho shrieked, the sound splitting the night. He shrieked again, and a loud clatter came from the cottage.

‘Is-Is it the Nightingale? Gods. G-Gods he’s back, he’s back, he’s b-back, he’s _back, he’s back, oh Gods, p-p-p-please no, no, no, no-’_

‘No!’ Anika gasped, hearing the huge, repeated gasps, the wet sound that meant he was possibly crying. She looked around and spotted the nightingale and shook her head, running after it to scare it away. It fluttered out of sight, and she came back to the cottage, hearing thin whining on every exhale, the sounds of terror. ‘Terho, it was just a regular nightingale.’

There was no such thing, for Terho, anymore. She and her family were always very careful to remove any nightingale nests they saw. But with no nightingales claiming the territory, they always tried to slip in again, to nest in the choice land.

‘Terho, it’s just a regular nightingale, I promise. I promise you.’

The sound of Terho’s terror – babbling and stuttering and wretched gasps and dry sobs – was too much for Anika. She couldn’t think of what to do, turning in two full circles. She couldn’t go in there and comfort him. She couldn’t call him out. She couldn’t even see him. She couldn’t do _anything._ She clenched her fists and was glad at least that the nightingale had stopped calling.

‘Terho, I promise. I swear it.’

Her words meant nothing.

She knelt by his round stone window, the hamper no longer resting upon it. She looked up, unable to see him, hearing those panicked sounds. He didn’t seem to be calming down at all. And when she waited even longer, she realised that he wasn’t going to stop. He was in something bigger than she understood, and she was afraid that it would ruin all of their progress. It would ruin everything. Some dumb bird.

Her heart thumped in her chest.

Terho moaned low and long, and then his voice was muffled, as though he was holding cloth to it to stifle his sounds. The sobbing started again. The gasping.

Anika looked down at the glowdaisies and picked one, placing it quickly at the base of the round window. She picked another, and then another.

‘Look, Terho,’ she said, picking them, feeling foolish, knowing it wouldn’t work and needing something to do. ‘Look. Glowdaisies.’

She picked more, piling them on top of each other. And then she picked other flowers too. Red and white, others the colour of lustrous gold. She picked tiny pink sprays of flowers and heavy roses.

‘Flowers, Terho,’ she said, piling them ever higher on the rim of the window. Some were spilling inside now, and she couldn’t make herself stop. She wouldn’t leave and run away from his terror, but nor could she sit still in the face of it, either. Her hands glowed from the glowdaisies, her fingers smelled of pollen and spices. And still she picked them, not bothering to count, denuding the small shrubs and plants before her, to place everything she could get where he might see it.

She had no idea how much time passed, before she was running out of flowers. She was gasping too, her heart beating so hard. She hadn’t realised he’d stopped crying until she realised that she was the one making the most noise. She was the one panicking.

‘Wh-what are you doing?’ Terho rasped, his voice wet, nasal. She head footsteps scraping across the floor, felt him come closer.

‘There are flowers, Terho,’ she said, her voice weak. ‘You never get to see them.’

‘It’s…made a bit…of a m-mess,’ he said.

She laughed, but unlike Terho and the King of the Seelie, her laughter was not cynical nor wounded, it was relieved. ‘Has it?’

‘Oh, y-yes.’

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said, blushing. She buried her hand in the flowers on the lip of the window. ‘I’ll move them.’

‘N-no,’ he said, and she started when she felt a cool palm on the back of her hand. Little overgrown claws rested lightly on her skin. ‘L-leave them.’

‘Are you sure?’ she whispered.

He was touching her. He was touching her and being so gentle about it. He was a healer, and he had healer’s hands. Her hand was smothering the flowers, her wrist rested uncomfortably against the stone, but she didn’t dare move. She thought that love was a large word, and she didn’t know if she’d ever say it to him. But in that moment, there was the touch of her skin against his skin, and it was bigger than she could have imagined.

It wasn’t that she wanted children with him, or anything like that. No. She just wanted this. Connection.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and his palm shifted on the back of her hand.

‘W-will you t-talk to me?’

‘Of course,’ she said, and she smiled as he withdrew his hand. She wouldn’t push him. This was more than he’d ever offered before, and he was scared and worn out. ‘You could go lie down if you want. Have…some rest? You must be tired?’

‘N-no, I’ll just st-stay here, and listen t-to you. Unless…I’m k-k-keeping you?’

‘No,’ Anika said, looking up at the stars, feeling freed by the sky even as she knew that Terho felt trapped by it. ‘Not at all. I can talk about anything you want.’

‘Anything,’ Terho said, his voice clear.

Anika wove stories for him, and plucked a glowdaisy from the windowsill and pushed it behind her ear just so, smiling to wear it. She felt a largeness in her heart, her whole body, and wished she could cut it in half and give it to him. But in lieu of that she poured out her words, gave him whatever she thought he might accept.

She felt the echo of the touch of his hand across the back of hers acutely. It was something that made her realise for the first time that Terho had a largeness inside of him as well. He wasn’t just a small mouse-boy – he was a caged hero, and she would find a way to him, because she had time, and she was patient.

She thought of the sky, and knew that somehow, one day, he would no longer be afraid. And no matter how cynical the King, or Terho, she would wait for that day and welcome it. In the meantime, she could give him food and flowers, the lilt of her chirpy little voice, and hope that it would be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is love. <3 :)


End file.
